Archives for April, 2006

There’s a hilarious, and often thoughtful, comment thread over at The American Scene. Ross Douthat is a Roman Catholic, and many of his readers are serious intellectual Christians. So, I am always interested when they object to the bizarre and obviously anthropogenic hocus-pocus of Mormonism. Some snips of interest: dude, mormans are weird. let’s just…

Over at John Hawks, Has the dam broken on mtDNA selection?. I don’t know if this matters that much scientifically since non-human phylogeography tends to be more cautious than the field of historical human population genetics, but it matters a lot for the public which has been habituated to a steady stream of mitochondrial data…

There is a preprint in the website of The American Journal of Human Genetics titled “Genetic variation in the CCL18 – CCL3 – CCL4 chemokine gene cluster influences HIV-1 transmission and AIDS disease progression.” The title is a mouthful, but the short of it is what we’ve known for a long time, that human genetic…

Greg Cochran’s comment below is worth turning into a post: There’s more to it than that. Tribes often have extremely limited HLA variation, contain only a small subset of the variation that you see in a wider set of Amerindians. Whereas in the old world, even little tiny groups with very low gene flow have…

Evolgen says: Let’s focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and essential information that you must know to be able to read the science section of a newspaper. Hm. Amen. Sort of. Scientists in many fields needed to be straight-jacketed into the “hypothetico-deductive” model for a reason. I remember a phylogeneticist telling a group…

The San Jose Mercury News has a review up of Ann Gibbons’ The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. It concludes: But too many pieces are still missing from the puzzle — including fossils of the ancestors of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas — to allow for a clear picture of…

Earlier this week I hinted that I had a priori genetic reasons for being skeptical of a “two wave” theory for the peopling of the New World. Well, I was going to do some literature searches and slap something together that was meaty, but I don’t have time, so I’ll just offer up an attenuated…